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Childhood sports participation linked with activity in early adulthood
Children who never participated in sports were more likely to become inactive when they reached early adulthood, according to a recent study.
“This study suggests that sports participation could be critical to avoid a consistently inactive pattern and that the developmental pathways of [physical activity] and television viewing behaviors could be related,” Soyang Kwon, PhD, from the Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute and Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, and colleagues wrote.
Kwon and colleagues used data from the ongoing longitudinal, prospective Iowa Bone Development Study to identify the developmental pattern of moderate-to-vigorous-intensity physical activity (MVPA) and how it correlates with sports participation and television viewing. The study followed children and young adults aged 5 to 19 years from September 1998 to December 2013.
MVPA was assessed using an accelerometer. Participants were asked to wear the device for 4 consecutive days at ages 5 and 8, and for 5 consecutive days at ages 11, 13, 15, 17 and 19. The cohort included 537 participants (50.1% girls, 94.6% white), who completed at least one assessment and wore the accelerometer for a minimum of 8 hours a day for 3 consecutive days. Depending on age, parents or participants responded to a sports participation and television viewing questionnaire every 6 months. Participants were considered physically active if they took part in at least one organized sport.
According to the results, mean accelerometer wear-time was 12 hours or more per day for 5 days and each participant completed approximately 23 Physical Activity Questionnaires (PAQs) in their lifetimes.
The researchers identified four MVPA trajectories, including consistently inactive (14.9%), consistently active (18.1%), decreasing moderate physical activity (52.9%) and substantially decreasing high physical activity (14.1%).
All of the participants who were consistently inactive reported no sports participation. The researchers wrote this finding could also be contributed to socioeconomic status.
Participants who decreased the few hours of television they watched from childhood to early adulthood were associated with consistent activity (P < .001). However, there was no observed correlation between those who continued to spend many hours watching television and consistent inactivity. There was also no significant difference in constant inactivity between the proportion of participants who watched the most television vs those who watched the least television (P = .35), or between those who maintained a high amount of television viewing hours and the rest of the participants (P = .27).
In other results, girls accounted for 84.8% of the consistently inactive population and were more likely to follow that trajectory (P < .001). However, there were no gender differences between any other sports participation (P = .88) or television viewing trajectories (P = .37).
The researchers wrote that further research is warranted to determine the health consequences of the participants in these MVPA trajectories. – by Stephanie Viguers
Disclosures: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
